Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Florin Curta" in English language version.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)The controversial and provocative Curta's view of the Slavic ethnogenesis has been challenged by several historians and archeologists. As far as I know, linguistic arguments have not been used in the discussion too much, even though the new theory gave rise to several linguistic issues. If the Slavs "were made" by the Byzantines from different ethnic groups on the border of the empire, how to explain the affinity of Slavic and Baltic languages? Why should the Proto-Slavic serve as lingua franca in the Avar khaganate? Is it possible that the speakers of Proto-Slavic came from "nowhere"? How to explain the early presence of the Slavs and Slavic in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, far from the Byzantine Empire and out of range of the Avar khaganate?
Despite Florin Curta (2015) declaring the prehistoric Slavs as a "fairy tale", they certainly existed at least in a linguistic sense: the Slavic language family is unexplainable without an earlier protolanguage, this Proto-Slavic must have had speakers, and "Slav" is the name that mediaeval sources mainly propose as the designation of those ... but there is also no reason to argue that they are totally unrelated groups of people. Linguistics shows the spread of the Slavic language in Eastern Europe in the second half of the first millennium CE; history and archaeology tell us about at least some major migrations in this same period of worsening living conditions (due to the Late Antique Little Ice Age and Justinian's Plague); population genetics shows the relatively recent common ancestry of most of the population in this area. These are distinct stories, but not unrelated stories, and the challenge is to construct an integrated view of the early speakers of Slavic on their basis, not to bury the Slavs under ontological doubts and methodological scruples.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)The lexical content of the living culture of the ancient Slavs before their separation refutes Curta's conclusions. As if Curta before our eyes were writing a new historiographic myth about them (Belaj, V., Belaj, J. 2018). Negative answers to such considerations were not in short supply either. Suffice it to mention the 2009 and 2013 works by the Ljubljana scholar Andrej Pleterski, and the 2010 work by the Ukrainian scholar Maksim Žih. The latter mocked Curta: "in summary, we could say that F. Curta's works are frequently structured on the principle leading "from (an a priori) concept towards sources". We may add that Curta's way of thinking is suspiciously similar to the stadial theory of the Soviet scholar Nicholas Yakovlevich Marr9 (see: Belaj, V., Belaj, J. 2018) ... In addition to the fact that Curta's conclusions cannot withstand a logical critique, they are also based only on selected evidential material he necessitated in order to infer the conclusions he had already made in advance.